to help us to understand and deconstruct capitalism in order to create a sustainable and peaceful social system.

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, September 29, 2016

France's “big idea for the world”

The author reports on how the French section of the US-led Empire is plundering Africa's resources by using NGOs and indigenous collaborators. For example, he offers this perspective on the Democratic Republic of Congo:

Since nominal independence from Belgium in 1960, the country has been a neo-colony of Western interests and has been maintained in a permanent state of war and poverty. The Congo is the world's richest nation. But its people are poor. The contradiction is called capitalism. Since the CIA and Belgian intelligence agents assassinated the country's first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, puppet leaders have proven untrustworthy.

He gets into the details of this plundering by reporting on French operations in various countries of Africa.